Forum for former BBC staff

May 2^nd, 2024, 11:34pm

	Welcome, Guest. Please Login
	To join this Forum send an email with this exact subject line REQUEST MEMBERSHIP to bbcstaff@gmx.com telling us your connection with the BBC.

Home

Help

Forum for former BBC staff › › Notices, obituaries and tributes › Chris Cviic

(Moderators: , Administrator, , )

‹ Previous Topic | Next Topic ›

Pages: 1

Chris Cviic (Read 5694 times)

Administrator

YaBB Administrator

Offline

Posts: 3254

Chris Cviic
Dec 30^th, 2010, 3:01pm

Christopher Cviic
6:56PM GMT 28 Dec 2010

Christopher Cviic, who died on September 11 aged 80, was a distinguished London-based journalist and commentator on south-eastern Europe.

A Croat, Cviic spent more than half a century in England, working at the BBC, The Economist, the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) and finally the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). He also spent a short unhappy spell as editor of a new journal, Tjednik (“Weekly”), in Zagreb, an experience which convinced him that he was better suited to life in Britain than Croatia.

Speaking and writing perfect English, and an Anglophile by affection and conviction, he fitted easily into British institutions and mixed effortlessly with British public figures. He was well read in the literature of many countries, but his favourite poet was TS Eliot and his favourite entertainment the novels of PG Wodehouse, one of which he carried wherever went.

Cviic’s depth of loyalty towards Croatia and his scorn for communism were wisely concealed behind a wall of professional objectivity and natural caution. But his shrewdness and his position probably allowed him to do more for Croatia and Bosnia behind the scenes in the 1990s than any other expatriate from the region.

At the time of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Cviic was working at Chatham House, where he edited the monthly magazine, The World Today, and appeared regularly on television and radio. He avoided polemic, but also avoided equivocation about who was the aggressor.

At this time he also became a regular adviser to – and soon friend of – Margaret Thatcher, who had embarked on a lonely crusade to challenge Western complicity in the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic. Enraged by some news report of what she considered Western (and usually British) feebleness, she would cry: “Send for Chris Cviic!”, and in he would come. Defying his reputation for amiable pliancy, he, like her, thought that Belgrade must be stopped, not appeased.

Krsto Cviic was born in 1930 near Nova Gradiska in northern Croatia. He was an only child, and his childhood was difficult. In 1937 his father walked out, later becoming governor of the National Bank under the NDH (fascist) war-time regime, which provided an excuse for ill-treatment of his family by the communists.

From his teens it was left to Krsto, now in Zagreb, to earn enough to keep himself and his mother, who was too ill to work. He taught himself English, and then taught others.

Imprudently, he often visited the British Council library. Still less prudently, he was a devout Roman Catholic and was denounced as a “clericalist”. He joined an underground group of students influenced by the philosophy of “personalism”, first propagated by the philosopher Alfred Mounier, which emphasised secular engagement and was much less hostile to liberalism than the Catholic nationalism traditional to Croatia.

Cviic’s anti-communism was also unusual. It did not spring primarily from the mistreatment of Croats at the hands of the Party, but from a radical dislike of communism as such, which he had imbibed from a lodger in his family’s flat, a White Russian later shot by the Partisans.
In 1954 Cviic applied for a job in the BBC World Service’s Yugoslav Section. He was denied permission to leave Yugoslavia until Vladimir Bakaric, head of the Croatian Communist Party, was informed that the alternative candidate was an ex-fascist Serb émigré. Permission was immediately granted.

During Cviic’s years at the BBC he was under constant observation by a colleague who reported back on him to the embassy. Then and later, he avoided public expressions of Croatian nationalism, while privately assisting the cause.

In his years at The Economist, as Eastern Europe correspondent, he practised the same cautious tactics. Sometimes the mask slipped. He criticised the crackdown launched by Tito against the reformers of the “Croatian Spring”, and an article in December 1971 was given the provocative title: “An Old Man in a Panic”. The Yugoslav government launched a formal protest, and the British Foreign Office also signalled its displeasure.

Cviic’s falling out with the regime of President Franjo Tudjman in the 1990s was hardly less spectacular. He strongly opposed what he saw as Tudjman’s policy of dividing up Bosnia in collaboration with Milosevic. Cviic put his name to an open letter calling on Tudjman to step down as president in September 1993. From then on he was vilified by a section of Croatian opinion even more virulently than he had been by the Serbs.

Cviic published three books: Remaking the Balkans (1991), in which he argued for a re-creation of a “Lesser Central Europe” to which Slovenia, Croatia and (significantly) Bosnia should adhere; a collection of essays in Croatian, Pogled Izvana (“The View from Outside”, 1994); and In Search of Balkan Recovery (2010), a study written with Peter Sanfey of the region’s economic prospects.

He is survived by his widow, Celia, and a son and a daughter

The Administrator.

IP Logged

Administrator

YaBB Administrator

Offline

Posts: 3254

Re: Chris Cviic
Reply #1 - Feb 4^th, 2011, 10:17am

Chris Cviic: Broadcaster and writer who became a leading expert on Yugoslavia and the Balkans

Chris Cviic was a writer and broadcaster who became a leading expert on the former Yugoslavia and the Balkans. Born in Croatia, the son of a businessman, he settled in Britain in 1954. His career took him to the BBC World Service, to St Antony's College, Oxford, to Chatham House and finally to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, which promotes foreign investment and economic reform in former communist countries.

The early life of Krsto Cviic was not easy. When the Nazis invaded Croatia in 1941, the Gestapo chief for Croatia was billeted in his flat. (The man tried to be friendly – bringing flowers to the flat and even presents for the young Chris. But Chris was usually out at night, interrogating suspected members of the Resistance.) He also witnessed the deportation of Jews, including at least one classmate, and later spoke of his disgust after being taken to visit a Nazi-sponsored anti-Jewish exhibition.

After the war he fell ill with TB but was able to graduate in English at Zagreb University. As a Catholic, his prospects under the Tito regime were limited, and in 1954 he got a job in the Yugoslav section of the BBC. It was not all plain sailing, because at that time Yugoslav citizens did not have the automatic right to go abroad. He got permission to leave only after a BBC manager had interceded on his behalf with the Croatian communist leader, Vladimir Bakaric.

While working at the BBC, Cviic also obtained a degree in International Relations at the LSE, as a pupil of Ralph Miliband. Then, in the late 1950s, he became a student of St Antony's College, carrying out research on pre-war Croatian politics.

In 1963 he was recruited by the late Gerard Mansell to the English World Service of the BBC (as it is now known), which is where I met him. The World Service was at that time a true powerhouse of ideas, to which Cviic soon became a valued contributor; a radio documentary which he produced on the 10th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian uprising was specially commended by the BBC Board of Governors.

Although he won rapid promotion, he decided in 1969 to accept the offer of a job at The Economist, where he worked until 1990, specialising in, among other things, ecumenical affairs, and Eastern Europe, which he frequently visited.

From the mid-1980s to the mid-'90s, Cviic edited the Chatham House journal The World Today. This was a period which saw the unexpected end of the Cold War and the even more unexpected turmoil of what came after. Cviic was well able in this situation to mobilise his numerous contacts to explain what was happening. On leaving this job at the age of 65, he returned to Croatia to promote democracy under the auspices of the George Soros foundation. The final phase of his career was in the years 1999-2007, when, long past retirement age he took on a largely full-time job as political adviser on Balkan affairs to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

To the end of his life, Cviic was a frequent contributor to the Croatian media. Two of his English books, Remaking the Balkans (1991) and In Search of Balkan Recovery (2010, written with Peter Sanfey) have become standard works in their field. When he finally gave up his job he began writing a book on the cultural heritage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Cviic was a person of manifest integrity which impressed even strangers: immediately after his naturalisation as a British subject, the Scotland Yard officer who had interviewed him in accordance with Home Office procedure offered his congratulations and invited him to meet for drinks. Among colleagues, Chris was extraordinarily popular, as I saw for myself. He was not, however, by temperament a pacifist; nor was he afraid to speak his mind. In the early 1970s he displeased the Tito regime by criticising its crackdown on Croatian nationalists (though he continued to be invited to the Yugoslav embassy). In the 1990s he was outspokenly critical of the British government's unwillingness to use force to end the Yugoslav civil war. He also criticised the methods of Croatia's first president, Franjo Tudjman, who then tried to sue him for defamation in the Croatian courts (the case eventually lapsed).

Chris Cviic was a person of solid convictions: a committed Roman Catholic and in politics a philosophical conservative (who was often willing to challenge my own political perspective). His friends think of him not so much as an Anglophile but as a quintessential Englishman – of a type who probably no longer exists, if ever he did. It was these virtues of tolerance and commonsense that he sought to convey to his country of origin, which was at one time riven by ethnic conflict. He made a strong impact there, which earned him an obituary on Croatian television. In a personal message to his widow, the Croatian president Ivo Josipovic praised him as a man of "wisdom and reason" and said that he had made "an immeasurable contribution" to the development of Croatian democracy.

Towards the end of his career he became influential in his country of birth and in 2001 received the OBE for helping to promote democracy in Eastern Europe. Cviic is remembered by his friends as a person of unstoppable momentum – as his career demonstrates. For them it is a matter for regret that he never found the time to write his own memoirs.

In 1961 he married Celia Antrobus who survives him together with a son, Stephen and a daughter, Antonia.

Krsto (Chris) Cviic, writer and broadcaster: born Croatia 3 October 1930; married 1961 Celia Antrobus (one son, one daughter); died 11 December 2010.

By:- David Wedgwood Benn

Source:-

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/chris-cviic-broadcaster-and-writer-...

The Administrator.

IP Logged

Pages: 1

‹ Previous Topic | Next Topic ›

« Home

‹ Board

Top of this page